DECEMBER 3, 1951

PARIS, Sunday—I listened to a most interesting lecture the other evening given by a French correspondent
who spent four weeks traveling around the United States as our guest with two other
French correspondents. He began his talk by saying he had found a new America from
that encountered on a visit seven months ago.

At that time, he said, he found everyone apathetic. Korea had not really awakened
us to the Soviet danger. But the discovery that the Soviets had the atom bomb had
turned the trick—and from an apathetic nation we have become an alert nation, backing
the administration's rearmament policy and doing our job both on the military and
economic side in a very remarkable way. He thought the great achievement of the Truman
administration was that so far, at least, rearmament had been accomplished with very
little dislocation of the civilian life of the people.

He went on to point out that in the United States we really had an aristocratic class
of laborers for whom our machines were slaves, and this was true of the woman in her
home as well as the workers on their jobs. Mass production had advantages. The jobs
were sometimes dull and automatic and very few men felt they had created something
from beginning to end. But that was another problem which he felt American ingenuity
would meet in its own time.

Some of the things he said would have worried a few of our Senators and Congressmen,
because he used words the mere sound of which frightens us. Anyone who said on a platform
in our country that there is such a thing as pure Communism, which had no relation
to Stalinism or the police state set up in Russia, would find many skeptics in his
audience, for a good many people do not know what the theory and practice of pure
Communism is.

I begin to think that everything cannot be as calm behind the Iron Curtain as the
USSR and its satellites would have us believe. They never miss a chance to tell us
about the perfections of life in the Soviet Union, and yet in the Herald Tribune a
few days ago it appeared that Vice Premier Slansky of Czechoslovakia, who was a former
secretary general of the Communist party, had been arrested by the Czechoslovak Communist
regime and charged with "anti-state activities" and "leading a conspiracy against
the republic." Other top officials have been arrested, so that apparently there is
trouble and people are disappearing right and left.

The number of refugees reported as coming in from East Berlin to West Berlin and as
crossing the borders from all the other Iron Curtain countries seems to be growing
and not diminishing. This must be a great anxiety to the Soviet leaders. If only they
would realize what a help it would be to establish normal relations with the outside
world and to have trade which would improve peoples' standard of living, then perhaps
they would accede or find a formula for verification and inspection of armaments under
international control. That would start us on the business of world disarmament and
give the people of the world a real hope for peace.

E. R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1951, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC.; REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR
IN PART PROHIBITED.)